(Important Note to Nevada and Washington: Look out! The wolf
population in WA is being described as "precarious", and
Nevada's is "extinct" -- how long until Your
farms, ranches and yards are targets for 're'introduction of large
predators? How many "neighboring states" are there to the
Great Lakes? There are many people -- plus their children and pets --
in many non-rural areas that will be impacted by this loosing of large
predators nationwide. Some of the language deception used in this
article may surprise you.)

February 9, 2005

By Jeff Barnard, Associated Press

Grants Pass, Oregon - A federal judge has struck down a Bush
administration rule that lowered Endangered Species Act (ESA)
protection for wolves that are migrating out of strongholds in the
Northern Rockies and Great Lakes into neighboring states.

In a ruling released yesterday, U.S. District Judge Robert Jones in
Portland rescinded the April 2003 decision by the U.S. Fish and
Wildlife Service, which had divided wolf range into three areas and
had reclassified the Eastern and Western populations as threatened
instead of endangered.

[USFWS] had left wolves in the Southwest in the endangered category.

"Interior Secretary Gale Norton tried to
gerrymander the entire contiguous 48 states so that wolves in a few
areas would make up for the absence of wolves in much-larger regions,"
said Michael Robinson of the Center for Biological Diversity, one of
the 19 environmental groups bringing the lawsuit.

"Now, instead of drawing lines
on the map based on political considerations, any future lines must be
based on science."

Under the court order, Fish and Wildlife will have to rescind federal
rules that allow ranchers to shoot wolves on sight if they are
attacking livestock, Robinson said.

Practically speaking, that only affects wolves now established in
northwestern Montana, because the ruling does not cover experimental
populations established in the 1990s in Yellowstone National Park,
elsewhere in Wyoming and in central Idaho, said Ed Bangs,
wolf-restoration coordinator for Fish and Wildlife.

But it will become more important as wolves migrate into nearby states
such as Oregon, Washington and Colorado, Robinson said.

In recent years, three wolves have been confirmed in Oregon, though no
wolves are known to be in the state at present. Oregon's Fish and
Wildlife Commission is set to vote next week on a state
wolf-management plan that would allow ranchers to shoot wolves
attacking livestock, based on the 2003 rule that lowered the
protection status to threatened.

Sharon Beck, an Eastern Oregon rancher and former president of the
Oregon Cattlemen's Association, said the ruling leaves ranchers little
recourse but to break the law -- known around the West as "shoot,
shovel and shut up" -- when wolves move into their areas.

"Even though the environmentalists won this round, this may be
the thing that really ends it all for them," she added.
"They are so insistent that wolves need to be everywhere, to
follow the Endangered Species Act -- there are going to be a lot of
people who disagree with that."

The judge ruled that Norton improperly applied the policy for
designating distinct population segments, extending the boundaries
from core areas where wolves are doing well in the Northern Rockies
and Western Great Lakes to include vast areas of the West and East
where they are just hanging on or extinct.

As a result, the status of wolves within the Western population, for
example, varied dramatically, from recovered in parts of Montana, to
precarious in Washington, to extinct in Nevada, the judge ruled.

The judge also found that Fish and Wildlife did not consider five
factors listed in the Endangered Species Act in evaluating the wolf's
status across its range: the state of habitat; over-exploitation for
commercial, recreational, scientific or educational purposes; threats
from disease and predators; the inadequacy of existing regulations;
and other natural or man-made factors affecting survival.

Fish and Wildlife expressed disappointment in the ruling.

"We believe our rule provided for biologically sound management
of the core population of wolves in areas where we knew they could
thrive as stable viable populations," the agency said in a
statement. "We also believe the rule was correct as a matter of
law under the Endangered Species Act."

Fish and Wildlife was considering what needs to be done legally and
biologically to get back on track, and whether to appeal, Bangs said.

Mike Senatore, vice president of Defenders of Wildlife, said the
ruling would make it more difficult for the Bush administration to
reduce or eliminate Endangered Species Act protection for wolves and
other species that have blocked development of their habitat.

"There is a pending proposal out there to delist the wolf in the
eastern part of the country, the Great Lakes and Northeast," he
said. "This decision certainly is going to make it virtually
impossible to move forward on that proposal."

Virtually wiped out in the lower 48 states to control attacks on
livestock, wolves were reduced by the 1970s to a small population in
northern Minnesota.

In the 1980s, a small number migrated naturally into northwest Montana
from Canada.

Gray wolves were reintroduced in and around Yellowstone National Park
in 1995 and 1996, and federal wildlife officials have declared their
recovery a success. Officials estimate there are now 825 or more
wolves in the Western population in Montana, Idaho and Wyoming.

About 3,200 wolves are estimated to be in the Eastern population in
Minnesota, Wisconsin and Michigan.

A small number of Mexican wolves were reintroduced in the Southwest in
1998.